Slashdot Mirror
Google Donates $2 Million To the Wikimedia Foundation
k33l0r writes "Yesterday, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and other projects, announced that it has received a $2 million donation from Google. This is the first time that Google has supported Wikipedia, and it has many wondering why. Anyone remember Knol, Google's answer to Wikipedia?"
The impact of the Gates' money is immediate, but in the long run a well-funded knowledge base is much more effective at raising the standard of living worldwide. Again, Google upstages Microsoft. Is there anything they can't fail at?
No, Google donating $2 million to Wikipedia doesn't even come close to upstaging the enormous philanthropy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
because Bing does http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Benefactors
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is sitting on billions, but only spends 3% of their endowment in a given year.
The correct number is more like twice that, and is typical of foundations that spend money based on endowments, the point of an endowment is to allow an organization to do work over an extended period of time, something impossible to do if you spend 50% of your money every year.
If you looked at actual dollars handed out in a given year, I wouldn't be shocked if Google (and Google.org) hands out more cash than the Gates Foundation.
2009 Gates Foundation: $3.8B: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2632188420090126
Google.org's entire charitable endowment is less than a third of that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google.org.
It ain't even close, you're off by at least two orders of magnitude.
The Gates Foundation has been asking others to give to them to hand out. The largest contributer to the Gates Foundation is Warren Buffet.
[citation needed]
Gates' donation to the foundation is of a similar size to Buffet's, the tho had known each other for many years (play bridge together, I'm told). The Gates Foundation survived for many years with no other contributions, and I'm unaware of a single dollar that's come from any other source.
There have been many well-researched in-depth pieces that suggest The Gates Foundation is doing more harm than good right now.
[citation needed]
The LA Times 2007 piece questioning the Foundations never made that particular claim, it did raise a signficant issue in that direction though. Because endowments must invest the money they hope to use for work in the future, conflicts arise when those investments do harm. It's entirely fair to say that it's irreponsible not to look those costs.
Of course, if you read, say, the articles in the Times that discussed this, you almost certainly saw the article in the Times a few days later saying that the Gates Foundation had decided to reassess its investments for social responsiblity.
(I'd admit, by the way, that those questions can still be pretty complex. A few obvious corporations aside, most corporations do quite a number of things, many of them bad, many of them good. "How much?" can be a very challenging thing to quantify.
When The Gates Foundation was pressed about it, they said they can't be bothered to research the firms they invest it.
[citation needed]
But there are people who've linked Gates Foundation investments to Microsoft contracts and strong-armed deals.
[citation needed]
Until it is clear that The Gates Foundation is doing more good than harm, I'm not sure we should be so quick to praise them, let alone donate money to them.
Nobody is asking you to, in fact, can you point me at a place where it is possible to donate to the Gates Foundation? No, you can't, because they don't accept external donations in general. Show me the donate button on this page, and we'll talk:
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/home.aspx
I'm a nature photographer.
The problem with giving to Wikimedia is that they have been so wasteful of the money they've been given. The move to the Bay Area is chief exhibit #1 - why move an organization whose whole purpose, mission, and asset is a web page to one of the most expensive real estate locations on earth?
I'm not the only one who thinks Wikimedia has more than enough money.
Advice: on VPS providers
Nobody is asking you to, in fact, can you point me at a place where it is possible to donate to the Gates Foundation? No, you can't, because they don't accept external donations in general.
Were one to advocate for the devil one might point out that every purchase of a PC which has ever come preinstalled with Windows due to Microsoft's per-processor licenses was and is an involuntary donation to the Gates Foundation.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine